The S&P 500 finished higher on October 28th, even as breadth logged its weakest reading on a green close since 2006.
Here’s the chart:
Let's break down what the chart shows:
The table lists 50 (276 total since 2006) of the most extreme cases where the S&P 500 closed higher despite negative net breadth. Each row shows the number of advancing and declining stocks, the daily change in the index, and the S&P 500’s forward returns over 1, 3, 6, and 12 months.
The Takeaway: Days like this are rare'ish but not bearish.
The S&P 500 has closed higher on 276 occasions since 2006, when decliners outnumbered advancers.
And October 28th ranks as the weakest of them all. Historically, these bad-breadth up days have not marked exhaustion. They have often appeared mid-trend, when leadership is narrow but resilience still defines the tape.
The longer-term record is quietly impressive. Across these top 50 cases, 12-month forward returns show a median gain of 14.6% and an 84% win rate.
Most of the time, the market was higher a year later, and usually by double digits.
Weak internals on a green day tend to resolve upward, not downward.
Risk and reward still favor the bulls. In similar cases, the S&P 500 has gone on to rise far more often than it has fallen.
Bad breadth days can look ugly in the moment, but history shows they belong to healthy bull markets, not broken ones.
One day does not change the primary trend. Will this primary bull market trend prove, once again, to be stronger than a single bad breadth day?
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